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Downsizing Blog

Today the Cato Institute placed an ad in major newspapers highlighting specific spending cuts that policymakers should make to restore our country's fiscal sanity and economic stability. Our public call for policymakers to demonstrate leadership on spending cuts comes in the midst of the on-going battle on Capitol Hill over funding the government for the remainder of fiscal 2011.

The federal government has been meddling with sugar production since 1934. Today’s convoluted system of supply controls, price supports, and trade restrictions benefits domestic sugar producers at the expense of consumers and utilizing industries. In other words, sugar producers “win” and the rest of the country “loses.”

Last year the House Republican leadership created the GOP’s “YouCut” website, which offers several possible spending cuts for citizens to vote on. The cut with the most votes goes to the House floor for an up-or-down vote. It’s a decent idea, but unfortunately, most of the cuts the GOP have offered thus far only amount to chump change.

A new Cato Policy Analysis from Michael Tanner examines so-called “entitlement programs” – chiefly Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – and how they will push the government’s finances to the brink if they’re not reined in. As he notes in the introduction, if politicians continue to duck the issue, they “will condemn our children and our grandchildren to a world of mounting debt and higher taxes.”

An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal written by the American Council for Capital Formation’s Margo Thorning makes a good case for “pulling the plug” on subsidies for electric vehicles. Subsidies for alternative energy vehicles have been popular with both Democrat and Republican administrations, but the Obama administration has been a particularly enthusiastic supporter of industrial planning.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the chairman of the conservative House Republican Study Committee, recently introduced “The Welfare Reform Act of 2011.” The legislation’s two key components are the imposition of work requirements on food stamps recipients and the capping of total spending for 77 welfare programs at 2007 levels (adjusted for inflation going forward) when unemployment drops below 6.5 percent.

It is often said that silence is golden. But not when you’re trying to land a passenger plane at Reagan National Airport. Last night the control tower at Reagan went silent, which forced the pilots of two airliners to land on their own. According to the Washington Post, the same situation occurred last year when the lone controller on duty locked himself out.

Last year I noted that the White House Office of Management and Budget homepage featured a call from the president to “invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt.” Yet, the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of his then-current budget proposal showed that publicly held debt as a share of GDP would rise like the steep slope of a mountain under his policies.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has released a detailed plan that would balance the federal budget in five years. Paul’s plan would achieve balance by halting and reversing the historic rise in federal spending. Taxes would not be increased, but revenues would steadily increase as the economy recovers.